CMU Artists Of The Year 2014

Each December, we select our ten favourite artists of the year – acts who we think have gone above and beyond the usual requirements of a performer. So, below are the artists who, for us at CMU, made 2014. Listen to a playlist featuring music from all ten here.

Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift, eh? Taylor Swift. Where would the world have been without the musical saviour of 2014? Trapped in a room with Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith, that’s where. So thank the cosmic forces of the universe that Taylor Swift finally became the popstar she’s long been threatening to become this very year. A popstar who will slap you around… [READ MORE]

Kate Bush
I think the world will always be waiting for Kate Bush; patiently waiting for her to do something else extraordinary. And it still feels that way today, even when she’s already given her all this year, playing night after night after night (over 22 nights) of ‘Before The Dawn’, her first live show since the only other live show of her now 56 years… [READ MORE]

Babymetal
When the music of 2014 is boiled down to three and a half minutes of reminiscence delivered by six rent-a-talking-heads in 20 years time, it would be a major oversight to miss out a mention of Babymetal. Their emergence into the world, and into the unlikely embrace of the metal community, may well be one of the most 2014 things to happen… [READ MORE]

Run The Jewels
Killer Mike and El-P, two 39 year old married-with-kids rappers, ripped another big, noisy rent in the hip hop fabric earlier this year when they released ‘RTJ2’, their latest LP as Run The Jewels. It’s a collaborative mine that’s proven richer than anyone, least of all the pair themselves, can ever have anticipated. At least, richer than… [READ MORE]

Matt Farley
You may or may not have come across the name Matt Farley, or Motern Media, at some point this year. A lot has been written about how he manages to earn the US minimum wage from his music, despite being almost unknown. The trick, it turns out, is to record and release around 16,000 songs on iTunes and Spotify – something he has managed… [READ MORE]

PC Music
Doing a quick scan back over 2014, I can’t think of any one sonic ‘thing’ as innovative, or on the flipside, as mind-slicingly schismatic and impossible to pin down as PC Music, aka Personal Computer Music. And no, in spite of this being an Artist Of The Year feature, PC Music isn’t any one artist, but a London-based label collective of many, captained… [READ MORE]

St Vincent
When it was announced a year ago that Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, had signed a new record deal with Universal it was a weird feeling. She seemed not only inherently tied to independent music and the creativity it allows, having worked exclusively with the Beggars Group up to that point, but one of the indie community’s real stars… [READ MORE]

Ratking
Noisy NYC new-wavers Ratking aren’t only for fans of hip hop, even if in the main that’s what the trio – made up of impossibly young MCs Hakeem ‘Hak’ Lewis and Patrick ‘Wiki’ Morales, and almost as young production guy Eric ‘Sporting Life’ Adiele – are doing. Ratking are also one for the art-and-skate-and-graffiti-and-zine kids still somehow contriving… [READ MORE]

Cibo Matto
Over a few years in the late 90s, Cibo Matto built themselves a respectable cult status, never much troubling the charts but critically acclaimed and loved by fans for their eclectic hip hop-based sound and lyrics that struck the right balance between being funny and standing up to repeat listens. Then, with two albums in the bag – ‘1996’s… [READ MORE]

Angel Olsen
Making even the slightest ripple in a pool so thickly fogged with singer-songwriter-y type folk artists isn’t easy, nor is breaking beyond that closeted folksy corner to make contact with the pop/dance/hip-hop-loving world at large. Especially since, in this post-Mumfords era in which we live, it’s hard to prise the ‘image’ of the folk genre away from the idea… [READ MORE]